Why is Illiteracy Seen as Cool?
Why is it, the inability to write and speak the English language correctly, is considered cool by most of the younger of society?
In my day-to-day life I see an incredible number of ridiculously simple grammar rules being broken, misused or ignored. Perhaps the most common, is the "there/their/they're" rule. To me, it is incredibly obvious which there/their/they're to use in which scenario, and this has been the case since I was about six! I positively cringe when I see this mistake being made by people even older than me in particular. Why does the English population find this so difficult?
Another common problem is when two words can be joined together in certain contexts. An example of this is the word "ago". The word 'ago' means gone or past and usually precedes a noun such as "Five days ago...". I've often seen this word used in place of 'a go' - two words, in a sentence such as, "When is it my turn? I want ago!"
The next thing on my list of pet-hates is people using the word 'me' in place of 'my'. Who do this? It's not any shorter - so that's not an excuse. "Where's me book?". So annoying!
The next thing that grinds on me is perhaps less well known, 'though it needn't be, is the correct use of adverbs. If, for example, I had tree different cars, I could say "car A is the fastest". This is fine and perfectly correct grammar. However, when there are only two, the correct thing to do is to append -er instead of -est. If I have two friends, one friend is taller. Similarly, if I have three friends, one friend is tallest.
Most of grammar is more-of-less subjective. That is, whether to use a comma or not, or perhaps a semi-colon and so on, is, to an extent, a matter of opinion and there is no definitive yes/no answer. This doesn't bother me. This is all down to the author's individual writing style. What does bother me, is when the (usually simple) rules of English grammar are broken [such as the aforementioned]. Furthermore, what really bothers me, is when I write blogs such as this, and I get comments back pointing out my "grammar mistakes" where the "mistake" is either something objective [where what I have written is fine although alternatives are equally acceptable, a spelling mistake [different to a grammar mistake] or just clearly a typo.
And should I dare point out a person's grammar errors, it usually will end up in an argument. "Who cares?". I care! Most non-English English speaking people can speak and write better English than most English people. That's really saying something!
